Site Mobile Navigation

Putting a Bolder Face on Google

IN late December, Marissa Mayer was vacationing in Africa when her boss, Jonathan Rosenberg, e-mailed her asking if she was leaving Google.

It wasn’t a routine query. As the gatekeeper of Google’s home page, and one of the company’s most ubiquitous and closely watched public faces, Ms. Mayer controls the look, feel and functionality of the Internet’s most heavily trafficked search engine. Rumors of her possible departure had lit up the blogosphere and offices across Silicon Valley.

None of it, she assured Mr. Rosenberg, was true. And Ms. Mayer, who is Google Employee No. 20 and the company’s first female engineer, still says she isn’t leaving; she says she has gone out of her way to inform Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as the chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, that she is staying put.

“It could not be further from the truth,” she says of gossip about her departure. “It made me realize that people don’t understand me.”

People may not understand Ms. Mayer, but as the “it girl” at one of the world’s hottest companies she is very hard to ignore. A popular guest on TV news programs and talk shows, a Google-booster often quoted in print, and a rapid-fire presence on San Francisco’s social scene, she is the rare executive who has become — at least in the sometimes cloistered world of computer geeks — a celebrity.

As such, she has invited attention — and in some cases, derision — in the last year for such actions as creating spreadsheets to find the perfect cupcake recipe, attending lavish ballet, art and fashion galas, paying $60,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with Oscar de la Renta, and hosting breezy, dying-to-get-invited-to parties at her $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.

Her live-out-loud lifestyle seems so un-Silicon Valley, but at the same time, perfectly in tune with what Google is all about.

“I refuse to be stereotyped,” she says. “I think it’s very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she’s a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.’ ”

Yet, despite whatever frivolity might attach itself to her, Ms. Mayer, 33, plays a pivotal, serious role at Google. Almost every new feature or design, from the wording on a Google page to the color of a Google toolbar, must pass muster with her or legions of Google users will never see it. She is one of the few Googlers with unfettered access to and influence over Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, and Valley wags wonder whether Google’s familiar white home page will even look the same if she leaves the company.

“Knowing Marissa, if she were considering leaving Google, she’d do it in an orderly way,” says Mr. Rosenberg, who is Google’s senior vice president for product management.

Others have a different view. Matt Rabinowitz, a close friend who has known Ms. Mayer since their days on the Stanford debate team in the early 1990s, says he thinks she might move on.

“Her quirkiness aligned beautifully with this moment in history when Google took over the Internet,” he says. “If she keeps growing at Google, she will stay there. There is nothing else like it now. She is in a position of leverage.”

WHEN Ms. Mayer joined Google after graduating with a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford in 1999, the company was a shoestring start-up where nobody expected to get rich quick, let alone become billionaires.

She started out writing code and overseeing small teams of engineers, carving out a niche for herself by developing and designing Google’s search offerings.

Photo

A defender of consistency in design, Marissa Mayer stands guard over the look and feel of Googles search engine.Credit
Noah Berger for The New York Times

An engineer at heart, she also had something that many of her peers did not during Google’s early days: a keen sense of style and design. She adored bold blocks of color against a white background, much like the Marimekko prints that once hung in her childhood home in Wausau, Wis. Her San Francisco penthouse has a similar, but more expensive, aesthetic. It is painted in neutral shades and decorated with fanciful, multihued glass artwork by Dale Chihuly.

Google’s home page — spartan white embroidered with splashes of blue, red, yellow and green — mirrors her Wausau home and her penthouse.

“It used to be people would come over to my apartment and say, ‘Does your apartment look like Google or does Google look like your apartment?’ ” she says with a staccato laugh that has earned a following of its own in Silicon Valley. “I can’t articulate it anymore. I really love color. I’m not very knick-knacky or cluttery. My place has very clean, simple lines. There are some elements of fun and whimsy. That has always appealed to me.”

As vice president for search products and user experience, Ms. Mayer has wedded her personal tastes with an ability to manage her bosses, including a capacity to easily communicate and champion ideas with Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, both of whom are also friends.

Since joining Google, she has introduced more than 100 products and features, many of which have thrived: Google News, Gmail and Image Search, for example. Others, like Orkut, have had a harder time finding an audience in the United States.

“She is a catalyst for winning ideas,” Mr. Rosenberg says. “Marissa has been through the evolution of the Google playbook. She is part author. That is very important because she understands the design aesthetic of Google.”

In meetings with subordinates, Ms. Mayer comes across as a zealous copy editor or meticulous art teacher correcting first-semester students. With so many new recruits, she reasons, someone has to teach them how Google does things.

On a recent morning, a handful of program managers and other executives huddled around a long table in Building 43 on the Google campus here in Mountain View to review changes to products in development. Ms. Mayer was running late. The first team to present was ready, a Web page outlining their offering projected onto a large white wall.

“You are going to get comments from Marissa on that gray text,” a female colleague warns one of the waiting managers. “Be prepared for that.”

“I think the gray is unimportant,” he replies. “It looks fine.”

“I know,” the colleague says. “But you will get comments.”

Ms. Mayer enters the room a few minutes into the manager’s presentation and quickly interrupts him. “That gray-on-gray text is hard to read,” she says. “What are we going to do about that?”

“We can change it,” the manager concedes.

During a subsequent presentation, she is unimpressed by possible language for a Google Health page that would allow users to share medical information.

“I don’t like the words ‘invite’ and ‘view,’ ” she says. “Those two words are recreational. It feels too informal and lighthearted.”

“We used the word ‘invite’ because it’s an action word, so users know they have to do something,” a young product manager responds.

Photo

An impromptu meeting in 2002 in Googles offices brought Ms. Mayer together with Eric Schmidt, Googles chief, left, and the companys co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.Credit
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Ms. Mayer rolls her eyes. “It’s not a party,” she says.

She ends up giving the same or similar guidelines to managers for various Google features and products in other presentations that day. The guidelines are devised, she said, from myriad internal experiments to gauge users’ preferences. Avoid first- and second-person pronouns. Always write “Google” instead of “we.” If you want to make the design on the page simpler, take away one of these: a type of font, a color or an image. Don’t switch tenses. And steer clear of italics because they are hard to read on a computer screen.

SHE sighs when asked if she is bored with giving the same directions over and over. Clearly, that question has been on her mind. She and a team of designers are creating a style guide, she says, so she can quit repeating herself.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“The moment I don’t say something about the gray, we have a product that is inconsistent,” she says. “Once I let up, then something gets by. If we use the word ‘we,’ then users think we are picking their words for them. You have to try and make words less human and more a piece of the machinery.”

Besides, there’s a measure of protection for her in guidelines and decisions based on research, not on subjective whims. “Then it doesn’t become, ‘Who does Marissa like better?’ ” she says.

Despite such good intentions, Ms. Mayer sometimes appears to allow subjectivity — albeit temporarily — to reign as she helps steer Google along. How she navigates that divide surfaced during a recent kerfuffle over what shade of blue to use for the toolbar on Google pages.

A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade.

As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google’s revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Mr. Divine’s team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.

Her decision was diplomatic, but it also amounted to relying on her gut rather than research. Since then, she said, she has asked her team to test the 41 gradations between the competing blues to see which ones consumers might prefer.

More often than not, however, Ms. Mayer says she relies on charts, graphs and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating people.

At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy League schools, whom she wanted to meet as part of a program to foster in-house talent. In essence, math is used to solve a human problem: How do you predict whether an employee has the potential for success?

A scrum of executives sit around a table, laptops in front of them, as they sort through résumés, college transcripts and quarterly reviews. The conversation is unemotional, at times a little brutal.

One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.”

Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager’s expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn’t changed in several quarters.

“She is looking for a way out,” Ms. Mayer says.

There are plenty of people for Ms. Mayer to keep her eye on. She oversees 200 product managers who in turn supervise 3,000 engineers, or more than 10 percent of Google’s work force. Given her longstanding relationship with Google’s founders and Mr. Schmidt, she has become something of a sounding board for other managers, a number of whom routinely gravitate to her office.

Photo

Marissa Mayer at a meeting with fellow Googlers, from left, Tom Stocky, Swapneel Kshetramade and Ali Pasha. Ms. Mayer joined Google when it was a start-up.Credit
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

At the end of a recent day, she met with two senior executives, Joe Kraus and Sundar Pichai, to discuss the company’s social networking projects. Many executives at Google believe that social networking is important to its future. Ms. Mayer was meeting with Mr. Kraus and Mr. Pichai to help them prepare for a meeting the next day with Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to discuss how the company could leverage information-sharing among Google’s many services.

“It’s important you pregame Eric or it will be a disaster,” Mr. Pichai tells Ms. Mayer about the pending meeting, asking her to seek Mr. Schmidt’s support on their behalf.

“I know, I know,” she responds. “I will call him or write an e-mail. I want them to see how complicated this will be.”

Ms. Mayer e-mails Mr. Schmidt that evening. At the meeting the next day, Mr. Pichai’s and Mr. Kraus’s ideas are approved.

“Marissa is very good at driving the right conversation,” Mr. Pichai says. “If she hadn’t done that it would have been a train wreck for us.”

Still, students of Google’s culture wonder whether Ms. Mayer and her management style would flourish outside the insulated world where her tenacity and curiosity mirror the company itself. “She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro,” said John Battelle, author of “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.”

Any transition, too, could be particularly challenging, as the reputations of Ms. Mayer and others who were hired early on are so closely intertwined with the company. “You get comfortable being wealthy, getting attention, living in the bubble,” Mr. Battelle said. “It will be interesting to watch at which point they declare ‘who am I?’ by their definition, not Google’s.”

PICKING at a salad in a conference room at Google’s headquarters here, Ms. Mayer says she is vexed by how some perceive her. “I am not a girl about town,” she says. “It isn’t how I project myself. It is how other people choose to project me.”

Perhaps. But it also happens to be true that she enjoys talking about herself. Last summer, in an interview with Yelp, a Web site that tracks restaurants and other local services, she gushed over her favorite dry cleaner and shoe repair shop, and where to find the best pineapple malts in Palo Alto (the Palo Alto Creamery).

She told Yelp that she didn’t like odd numbers, had researched how to get the best deal on a San Francisco hotel room using Priceline, and noted that her gay friends demanded invitations to her women-only “Sex and the City” movie screening and birthday party.

Despite her complaints, Ms. Mayer also seems relatively carefree about her privacy. While photographs of her and her fiancé, Zachary Bogue, a private-equity executive, are instant Internet fodder, she says she rarely turns down requests for her picture from Drew Altizer, a photographer she knows and often sees on the party circuit. “Drew is trying to pay me a compliment,” she says.

Whatever Ms. Mayer chooses to reveal about herself publicly, Craig Silverstein, Google’s director of technology and a close friend, says that none of it is self-serving.

“It is not her job in talking to Yelp to get people to know her,” he says. “Marissa doesn’t care about the chattering classes. She likes shopping, fashion. And she is not going to stop just because people don’t like that.”

Besides, Ms. Mayer says, there are some things that she hasn’t previously revealed about herself and that the media have overlooked. Like her self-described athletic prowess.

“It hasn’t shown up anywhere that I am really physically active,” she says. “I ran the San Francisco half marathon this year. I did the Portland marathon. I went skiing just yesterday. I’m going to do the Birkebeiner, which is North America’s longest cross-country ski race. That just shows you how much there are gaps.”